New Jersey fuel treatment effects: Wildfire Airborne Sensor Program - orthorectified long-wave infrared and visible data images

This data publication contains infrared and visible data collected as part of a Joint Fire Science Program project designed to collect landscape-scale fuels data before and after prescribed fires to quantify consumption, collect data for the parameterization and evaluation of computational flow-dynamics models for simulating fire behavior, and synthesize data for the evaluation of fuels treatment effectiveness. The data include orthorectified in-fire long-wave infrared (LWIR) and visible (VNIR) images collected via a fixed wing aircraft with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Wildfire Airborne Sensor Program (WASP) instrument during three separate fire experiments in the New Jersey Pinelands, specifically in Ocean and Burlington Counties. Fire experiments Ex1, Ex2 and Ex3 were performed on 3/5/2013, 3/4/2014 and 3/19/2015, respectively. Ex3 includes only LWIR infrared data. A series of images were taken of the entire fire experiment approximately every three seconds for each fire.The data provided here were collected as part of the Joint Fire Science funded project: “Evaluation and Optimization of Fuel Treatment Effectiveness with an Integrated Experimental/Modeling Approach.” From 2001-2011, approximately US $5.6 billion was spent on hazardous fuel reduction to treat an average of approximately 2.5 million acres per year across the United States. Because of the cost and complexity involved, there is a need for implementing treatments in such a way that hazard mitigation, or other management objectives, are optimized. Our work integrated extensive forest census measurements, remote sensing methodologies, three highly-instrumented fuel reduction treatments, and numeric modeling of fire spread to test the principals and physics behind fuel reduction treatments. These datasets provide measurements for the evaluation of fuel treatment effects and effectiveness.Original publication date was 11/16/2017. Minor metadata updates were made on 11/17/2022.